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The 

Story  of  a  Quest 
through  a  Myriad 
Books  and  Days 
to  Find  the  Book 
of  the  Heart  which 
is  Humanity 

by 


Published   in    Los   Angeles 
at  4993  Pasadena  Avenue 


Copyright  1  920 

by 
Will  Levington  Comfort 


C77 


To  M.  M.  S. 


831909 


THE  FLOOR  OF  THINGS 

I  HAVE  always  wanted  to  be  happy ;  it  is  every  man's 
business,  the  quest  behind  everything.    To-day  I  can 
see  a  thread  which  marks  the  path  of  my  pursuit  of 
happiness  running  back  to  the  beginning,  through  books  and 
days.    .    .    .    The  first  book  I  ever  read  was  Grimm's  Fairy 
Tales,  a  story  there  called  The  Foster  Brother.     It  filled  me 
with  a  kind  of  madness  of  joy,  so  that  I  thought  it  must  be 
evil  to  love  anything  that  way.    Yet  I  determined  to  fight  for- 
ever for  my  right  to  this  dissipation. 

After  that  came  the  boy  books  from  the  public  library,  often 
twice  a  week,  on  parents'  and  friends'  cards,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  big  traffic  of  the  paper  covers  .  .  .  lighting  an  oil  lamp 
to  read  in  the  middle  of  the  night  .  .  .  secret  cougees  where 
another  boy  and  I  lay  cramped  and  suffocated  to  consume 
Nick  Carter,  Deadwood  Dick,  Old  Sleuth — thousands.  The 
things  with  hard  covers,  which  we  were  permitted  to  read 
openly,  were  milder  productions,  but  little  more  real — Henty, 
Fosdick,  Alger,  Oliver  Optic,  George  Manville  Fenn  and  the 
like.  Then  the  High  School  period :  Education  ended  for  me 
after  three  years  of  that,  and  romance  gradually  entered  into 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

the  world  of  physical  adventure.  F.  Marion  Crawford's  big 
list  became  as  one  novel,  and  heretical  science  began  to  disin- 
tegrate the  stout  hangovers  of  orthodox  religion  in  my  blood. 

Those  days  make  me  think  somehow  of  a  visit  long  after- 
ward to  Saint  Anne  de  Beaupre's,  way  up  beyond  Quebec, 
and  the  great  pile  of  crutches  and  splints  and  bandages  gath- 
ered there  at  that  place  of  healing.  The  odor  comes  back 
faintly  from  the  distance — days  good  to  look  upon  in  the  clear- 
ing perspective  of  one's  past,  but  hateful  and  intolerable,  the 
mere  thought  of  living  them  again.  When  I  first  read  of  the 
"pursuit  of  happiness"  in  the  Constitution,  I  thought  that 
grown-ups  must  know  all  about  it,  but  to  me  at  first,  it  looked 
questionable  to  be  happy. 

I  had  early  been  told  that  I  would  meet  my  Maker  when  I 
died.  "God  help  me,"  I  thought,  and  tried  to  produce  the  best 
Sabbath  countenance,  likely  an  expression  blending  fear  and  a 
desire  not  to  laugh.  It  was  school  and  a  breath  of  the  world 
that  helped  me  out  of  the  crutched  piety  of  childhood.  Again 
my  next  step  was  logical — into  the  sciences.  "Europeanism," 
I  have  heard  this  venture  called  of  late.  So  many  have  made 
it  that  it  needed  a  name.  Those  hard-headed  philosophers  sup- 
plied the  natural  cleansing  for  lungs  that  had  breathed  too 
long  the  thick,  dim  jungle  airs  of  personal  and  erotic  devo- 


THE    FLOOR    OF     THINGS 

tion,  but  they  lacked  humor  in  their  thumb-spanned  universe 
and  their  dogmatic  devotion  to  man-made  facts. 

Darwin,  Spencer,  Huxley  and  Tyndall — glorious  souls  im- 
prisoned in  "scientific"  minds.  But  Tyndall  could  not  have 
been  quite  satisfied  with  his  materialism,  for  in  his  Meditation 
on  the  Matterhorn  I  found  one  of  my  first  hopes  of  a  way  out. 
His  soul  breathed  for  a  moment  in  that.  Those  were  the  days 
in  which  we  walked  home  from  High  School — three  city  miles 
— and  in  changing  voices  discussed  and  discarded  the  gods  of 
our  parents. 

All  this  time  there  were  masses  of  fiction,  of  course,  but 
the  other  kind  of  reading  was  getting  a  foothold.  I  remember 
a  few  Sunday  afternoons  when  my  mother  and  I  read  Hia- 
watha and  Evangeline  and  the  Barefoot  Boy  and  Ode  to  a 
Waterfowl,  together — a  lingering  of  emotional  beauty  about 
those  hours.  It  was  natural  to  touch  Tennyson  then,  because 
he  was  one  of  the  pioneers  to  pass  through  the  terrific  Euro- 
peanism  of  his  brother  scientists.  He  has  told  about  his 
struggle  memorably  in  the  poem,  Locksley  Hall. 

Bravely  Tennyson  held  out  against  the  great  material  school 
of  his  time  and  held  hard,  too,  against  the  astral  drift  of  disin- 
tegrating orthodoxies.  Tennyson's  later  years  reveal  glimpses 
of  the  sage  and  the  saint  as  well  as  the  artist — the  artist,  in 
this  sense,  being  the  specialist  in  Beauty,  as  the  saint  is  spe- 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

cialist  in  Goodness,  and  the  sage  in  Truth.    The  three  are  said 
to  be  one  at  the  top. 

Then  the  still  firmer  hand  of  Wordsworth — fine  moments 
of  light  from  his  Intimations  and  Tintern  Abbey.  They  wear 
well. 

Carlyle  was  good  to  me.  There  was  a  time  when  that  was 
the  man  of  all  human  deities  whom  I  would  have  preferred 
to  come  to  my  room  and  stay  three  days.  I  saw  him  from  a 
great  distance  wrestling  with  the  Lie.  Carlyle  is  the  austere 
purity  of  the  pines  to  me ;  his  gray  craggy  beauty  is  a  mental 
image  of  proportion  now.  And  Emerson — I  like  to  contem- 
plate his  work  in  relation  to  questing  youth  everywhere. 
There  comes  a  time  when  Emerson  must  be  read.  For  a  little 
while,  at  least,  the  whole  school  of  us  passes  through  his  genial 
class  room. 

His  name  was  anathema  in  the  churches  then.  I  must  have 
gone  to  him  early  in  secret,  for  I  remember  when  he  was  hard 
reading.  The  time  came  when  he  was  the  sweet  voice  in 
my  heart;  and  he  opened  up  a  past  far  back  of  the  boyhood 
that  was  forced  to  learn  the  use  of  the  word  sin,  and  was 
troubled  with  the  thought  of  an  angry  God.  Rising  genera- 
tions will  be  far  along  before  they  can  do  without  Emerson's 
wise  and  gentle  ministration.  And  Thoreau — I've  taken  his 
clean  book  in  dissolute  days,  and  held  fast  to  it  through  the 


THE    FLOOR    OF     THINGS 

revolts  and  reactions  of  a  sick  and  nerve-shot  body.  There 
is  no  better  tonic  for  a  man  who  is  morally  disrupted  than  to 
breathe  Thoreau's  clean  air  again.  Ruskin  had  his  grim,  hon- 
orable part — a  man  sterile-clean. 

Also  a  fellow-American — I  think  I  am  touching  something 
now  that  will  strike  a  warm  chord  in  the  hearts  of  many  men 
who  are  middle-aged — the  emerging  of  Elbert  Hubbard  into 
our  American  life.  That  was  a  young  voice,  splendid  with  its 
repulsions  and  attractions.  I  remember  in  my  earliest  news- 
paper days  how  the  reporters  used  to  talk  about  him  with  a 
copy  of  The  Philistine  in  hand.  First  of  all  he  could  write — 
then  he  was  making  a  fight  in  the  lists  that  certain  of  us  have 
entered  since,  some  few  to  win,  the  many  to  lose  for  the  time 
— the  fight  to  be  ourselves,  to  say  ourselves,  to  make  ourselves 
fine  enough  to  be  used  and  firm  enough  not  to  rock  in  the  lure 
of  passing  seasons.  It  was  Elbert  Hubbard's  earliest  period 
that  challenged  me  and  stiffened  my  spine. 

Meanwhile,  I  was  becoming  more  and  more  engrossed  in 
the  writing  game,  and  the  big  whips  of  the  early  twenties  were 
Kipling  and  Stevenson.  Those  two  working-artists  of  our  time 
twisted  me  into  their  own  passages  for  a  while,  so  that  I  was 
more  of  them  than  of  myself — Kipling,  a  real  story  teller  of 
the  ages,  a  cosmic  boy  at  twenty-five,  but  merely  an  English- 
man at  fifty.  His  Kim  and  Dick  Heldar  made  me  know  Asia. 
When  Earth's  Last  Picture  is  Painted  is  as  lovely  now  as 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

ever.  There  aren't  as  many  book-things  as  the  fingers  of  one 
hand,  which  have  stood  for  twenty  years  as  true  and  flawless 
as  L'Envoi.  .  .  .  Treasure  Island — even  the  movies  can't 
spoil  our  boyish  tastes  for  that;  and  the  Stevenson  essays 
which  so  roundly  pleased  our  adolescent  days!  He  only 
meant  to  do  that  in  Virginibus  Puerisque.  One  of  his  highest, 
best  things  to  me,  I  seldom  hear  spoken  of — a  long  short  story, 
called  The  Treasure  of  Franchard. 

Too  much  of  a  cub  to  be  sent  as  a  reporter  when  the  Spanish 
War  began,  I  went  out  as  a  cavalryman.  I  was  a  good  horse- 
man, but  never  a  good  soldier.  With  careful  reserve  from 
this  distance,  I  may  say  that  single-handed,  save  for  the  aid 
of  some  Porto  Rican  rum,  I  broke  more  army  regulations  in 
one  twenty-four  hours  than  ever  was  equalled.  I  saw  Porto 
Rico  through  many  bars,  and  from  many  mounds  of  rooty  soil, 
for  I  dug  the  sinks  for  the  troop  through  intricate  weaves  of 
palmetto-root  with  an  armed  sentry  watching  me  work.  Once, 
as  I  picked  and  dug,  very  weary,  a  swelling  formed  on  my 
wrist.  I  whacked  it  around  so  that  it  became  more  visible, 
and  demanded  the  sentry  to  take  me  to  the  troop-doctor.  The 
latter,  after  examination,  permitted  me  to  go  to  my  bunk. 

This  bunk  was  in  a  black  room  with  some  bad  natives  and 
small-pox  in  the  place.  The  troop  accounted  me  safer  in  the 
native  prison  than  under  a  private  guard  in  camp.  There  was 
one  hole  in  the  wall,  the  size  of  a  shaving  mirror,  about  ten 


THE    FLOOR     OF     THINGS 

feet  from  the  floor,  and  in  its  ray  I  had  three  or  four  great 
days  with  Ouida's  Under  Two  Flags  and  Sienkiewicz's  Quo 
Vadis. 

The  authors  are  dead,  but  I  hope  they  know  the  joy  they 
gave  me.  How  blessedly  long  those  books  were,  and  what  a 
thirst  I  brought  to  them!  I  have  an  idea  that  there  are  big 
moments  in  both  books,  especially  in  the  Pole's  tale.  But  I 
wouldn't  look  deep  again.  They  filled  me  then  almost  unto 
the  first  madness  of  Grimm,  and  a  lesser  measure  of  the  rous- 
ing impregnation  of  The  Light  That  Failed.  In  something  of 
the  same  setting  as  Quo  Vadis  is  Ben  Hur — with  a  really 
great  fiction  moment,  prepared  for  patiently  throughout  the 
large  part  of  the  novel.  It  breaks  with  a  crash  I  cannot  forget 
.  .  .  the  dusty  paths  of  Palestine  at  evening  when  the 
Healer  touches  the  lepers  by  the  roadway. 

A  lot  of  books  sell  because  they  are  trash,  but  the  opposite 
is  also  true  occasionally.  A  real  book  bulks  big  of  its  own 
intrinsic  power.  Ben  Hur  has  that,  and  so  has  Trilby — an 
utterly  different  vibration,  but  a  spiritual  force.  Every  form- 
ing artistic  taste  of  mine  was  delighted  and  satisfied  by  Du 
Maurier's  great  book,  nor  was  I  a  boy  at  the  time.  Queerly 
enough,  and  here  I  was  different  from  the  crowd,  I  loved  his 
Peter  Ibbetson  quite  as  well. 

Very  early  in  the  twenties,  a  man  gave  me  Herman  Mel- 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

ville's  Moby  Dick.  I  looked  at  the  Harper  imprint  of  1850  and 
read  the  book  again.  Here  was  a  big  walloping  American 
whom  I  felt  hadn't  been  given  a  real  show.  I  set  out  to  give 
him  one — all  lit  with  the  subject.  I  did  a  Sunday  newspaper 
feature  on  the  greatness  of  Herman  Melville  and  the  national 
shame  of  forgetting  such  a  lordly  male.  A  Boston  paper 
wrote  me  coldly  that  Herman's  fame  might  not  yet  have 
reached  the  middle-west  where  I  thundered,  but  that  the 
Boston  papers  usually  had  something  about  him  every  Sunday 
— and  had  been  printing  Melville  comment  for  a  half-century. 

Then  I  found  Conrad's  Lord  Jim,  and  in  highest  enthusiasm 
wrote  to  McClure's  about  its  greatness.  They  replied  re- 
servedly, and  I  met  one  of  the  real  tragedies  of  the  writing 
game,  that  a  book  like  Lord  Jim  wasn't  selling.  Years  later  I 
found  almost  the  same  thrall  in  Conrad's  story,  Heart  of  Dark- 
ness. One  doesn't  read  words  or  pages  when  he  finds  a  real 
tale.  He  soars  in  the  soul  of  the  thing — a  dimension  above 
technique. 

Away  back  early  I  read  that  great  book  of  the  heart,  The 
Story  of  an  African  Farm — the  voice  of  a  real  girl ;  later  I  read 
her  Dreams,  the  work  of  the  girl  grown  up,  and  later  Woman 
and  Labor,  from  the,  mature  pen  grown  weary. 

I  read  Les  Miserables  first  in  early  boyhood,  following  the 
one  main  thread  of  Jean  Valjean  through  the  maze ;  later  when 


THE    FLOOR     OF     THINGS 

I  knew  something  about  books,  the  novel  came  to  me  again. 
It's  a  mighty  thing,  mightily  done  by  one  of  the  first  spiritual 
democrats,  a  book  that  touches  most  lives.  I  like  the  other 
Hugo  novels,  but  none  lie  broad  awake  in  the  meshes  of  mem- 
ory like  Les  Miserables.  Balzac,  on  the  contrary,  is  not  a  man 
of  a  single  book.  His  whole  list,  like  Crawford's,  means  one 
book  to  me,  and  one  of  the  best  on  earth,  culminating  in  Sera- 
phita,  which  in  sixty  or  seventy  pages  tells  the  great  story  of 
Swedenborg.  This  is  a  story  that  needs  badly  to  be  known. 

Dickens  is  a  man  of  marvelous  sketches — a  writer  of  certain 
pages  rather  than  books,  and  Tolstoi  was  really  writing  one 
story  all  the  time — the  story  of  his  own  spiritual  unfoldment. 
Tolstoi's  past-fifty  problems  are  the  problems  of  the  children 
of  the  New  Age  to-day.  The  greatest  thing  he  did  was  to  go 
out  alone  to  find  union,  even  in  the  last  hours  of  the  flesh,  with 
his  own  Master,  whose  Sermon  on  the  Mount  he  had  tried  to 
put  into  perfect  speech  for  twenty  years.  I  always  smile  at 
the  way  the  Associated  Press  men  and  other  correspondents 
followed  with  telegraph  wires  the  steps  of  the  aged  Russian 
on  his  last  journey.  They  sought  to  be  on  the  ground  for  the 
Meeting.  .  .  .  Tolstoi  was  on  the  Cross  for  the  rest  of  us 
most  of  the  time,  and  that's  the  first  and  most  intensely  real 
function  of  the  writer-man. 

In  one  of  those  years  between  twenty  and  twenty-five,  Wai- 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

ter  H.  Page  saw  some  short  things  of  mine  which  he  said 
had  promise.  He  asked  me  to  let  him  see  a  book  some  time. 
I  couldn't  wait  to  put  on  the  last  chapter;  couldn't  wait  for 
a  decision  by  mail,  but  followed  the  thing  on  to  New  York. 
The  publisher  took  me  in  to  him  one  hot  afternoon  and  refused 
the  book  in  the  softest  possible  terms.  He  was  genuinely  ten- 
der, and  he  told  me  afterward,  when  I  could  see  how-  right  he 
was,  that  he  never  saw  a  man  sweat  as  I  did  while  he  let  me 
down  and  out.  He  gave  me  a  real  book  that  day — one  I  have 
loved  to  give  to  boys  since,  Bob,  Son  of  Battle. 


THE     LIFTING     SPINE 


II 

THE  LIFTING  SPINE 

I  HAVE  never  been  a  saint,  and  yet  the  idea  grew 
upon  me  through  childhood  and  youth  that  the  Plan 
of  the  Universe  was  a  lot  bigger  and  more  perfect 
than  I  could  have  made  it.  Most  men  are  butting  their  idea 
of  the  Universe  against  a  greater  Plan  that  won't  give.  One 
must  bring  some  reverence  to  the  Plan  before  it  begins  to  un- 
fold, before  the  spirit  of  the  Plan  appears.  I  had  a  talk  with 
a  lawyer  in  a  small  town,  and  must  have  spoken  of  the  "spirit" 
of  something  once  or  twice,  for  he  stopped  me,  saying :  "What 
do  you  mean  by  spirit?  Do  you  mean  what  the  preachers 
are  talking  about  every  Sunday?"  I  hastened  to  explain  it 
wasn't  exactly  what  I  meant ;  that  I  meant  the  hidden  and  in- 
vincible loveliness  in  all  men  and  things. 

Everything  was  changed  when  I  began  to  get  the  first 
glimpse  beyond  the  three-score  and  ten  arrangement.  It  grew 
upon  me  in  the  same  way  as  that  the  structural  plan  of  the 
universe  was  better  than  my  idea  of  it.  I  began  to  see  that 
to  have  a  philosophy  or  any  adequate  explanation  of  life,  one 
must  hypothecate  a  before  and  after.  In  writing,  I  had  found 
subject  matter  on  the  pages  forming  before  me  day  after  day 
— that  I  didn't  know  I  knew !  Anyone  may  say  with  a  warm 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 


smile  that  those  writings  were  not  important.  They  were 
to  me,  because  they  were  bigger  than  I  was  when  I  sat  down 
to  the  desk. 

This  phenomenon  opened  up  a  psychological  problem  that 
has  not  ceased  to  work  since.  Did  I  have  a  Self  that  was 
greater  than  my  mind,  or  was  this  particular  and  passionately 
developed  aptness  for  writing  used  in  certain  fine  moments  as 
a  vehicle  for  some  one  wiser  than  I,  outside?  Sometimes  I 
inclined  to  one  view — again  to  the  other.  In  any  case  I  didn't 
handle  the  problem.  And  there  were  other  questions:  how 
about  dreams;  how  about  the  difference  between  myself  and 
others?  How  about  this  passion  for  writing  in  itself?  How 
could  my  fervent  inarticulate  love  for  certain  faces  be  ex- 
plained? 

I  had  not  heard  of  the  continuity  of  consciousness  beyond 
death.  I  certainly  am  not  preaching  any  dogmatic  view  of 
what  happens  after  death,  nor  do  I  undertake  to  tell  how  we 
come  and  go.  I  wouldn't  touch  reincarnation  at  all,  except 
that  it's  a  basic  thing  in  a  writing  about  books,  the  quest  of 
which  is  to  find  Happiness — what  they  meant  by  that  magic 
phrase,  "pursuit  of  happiness,"  in  the  Constitution. 

Now,  one  may  know  a  bovine  calm  of  the  senses,  but  the 
thing  I  mean  must  transcend  accident,  disease  and  death,  or 
I  pass  it  up.  Moreover,  I  don't  expect  to  meet  the  Big  Chief 


THE     LIFTING     SPINE 

the  minute  the  body  dies.  You  couldn't  end  a  story  as  obvi- 
ously as  that,  and  the  scheme  of  the  Universe  includes  all 
tales  and  tellers.  Even  as  a  child,  I  found  it  hard  to  adhere 
to  the  conviction  that  I  could  be  patched  up  to  meet  the 
Father  directly  after  this  adventure,  as  a  sick  actor  might 
be  massaged  and  stimulated  to  keep  his  appointment  with  the 
gathered  crowd.  There  was  a  neighbor  once  who  had  brooded 
over  a  mortgage  for  forty  years,  yet  he  expected  to  be  trans- 
lated to  the  Absolute  at  the  end  of  this  great  tribulation  and 
become  one  of  the  Lords  of  the  Holy  Universe. 

How  such  a  conception  of  the  Father  and  the  Human  Spirit 
can  stand  and  endure  in  the  presence  of  the  earth  and  the  solar 
system,  the  infinite  stars  and  their  invisible  planets — but  one 
does  not  have  to  look  up!  He  need  only  feel  the  fluttering 
phenomenon  of  his  own  heart,  or  look  at  his  own  knees,  or  the 
ploughed  lands,  or  breathe  them  after  a  rain;  at  the  grain 
coming  forward  like  the  song  of  returned  soldiers ;  at  the  leaf, 
at  the  clay-lump,  the  ant  under  the  clay,  the  grain  of  sand 
used  as  a  building  block  by  the  ant. 

I  have  felt  instants  of  happiness  of  late,  and  seen  glimpses. 
I  know  that  I  shall  arrive  and  that  you  shall  arrive,  but  anyone 
is  hopelessly  bogged  until  he  perceives  a  nobler  vista  than 
three-score  and  ten.  The  trail  at  this  point  is  a  defile  with 
a  big  rock  fallen  in  the  center  of  it.  You  can  get  your  infantry 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

by;  even  the  cavalry  can  scrape  past  against  the  walls,  but 
you  can  never  get  your  big  guns  through  until  you  blast 
the  rock.  In  other  words,  you  must  surmount  the  dogma  that 
one  organic  body  is  enough  to  prepare  you  for  heaven  or  hell. 

The  East  has  always  held  to  its  visions  of  the  Long  Road  of 
Life.  Children  of  the  New  Race,  which  is  the  first  blend  of 
the  East  and  West  to  walk  the  earth,  are,  in  the  main,  born 
with  an  understanding  of  this  principle,  and  need  only  to  be 
reminded.  Children  of  the  New  Race — what  I  mean  by  that 
will  leak  out  presently,  if  you  don't  know  already.  Look  well 
into  your  own  family  and  you  may  find  one. 

I  was  in  a  room  with  four  people  the  other  evening,  and  we 
discussed  the  inevitable  turning  from  the  old  to  the  new.  It 
transpired  that  the  whole  four  had  made  this  turning  under 
the  influence  of  one  author — Marie  Corelli — the  Romance  of 
Two  Worlds  having  performed  the  trick  in  three  cases.  The 
point  is  too  big  for  comment.  I,  too,  have  sat  under  the  art- 
lamps  and  cackled  at  Marie  Corelli's  sort  of  art,  but  I'm  inter- 
ested of  late  in  the  art  that  whips  thousands  of  lives  out  of 
the  old  and  into  the  new.  Mostly  this  turning  point  of  life 
involves  Theosophy,  or  Christian  Science,  or  New  Thought, 
but  about  this  time  I  went  out  to  the  little  wars.  In  the  first 
Russo-Japanese  campaign,  I  did  much  traveling  with  a  really 


THE     LIFTING     SPINE 

big  man,  named  Grant  Wallace,  who  was  ten  years  older 
than  I. 

In  junks,  in  steamer  bunks,  on  many  hatches,  afield  in 
blankets  at  night,  Grant  opened  up  my  mind.  It  hurt.  It 
came  fast.  He  was  in  and  out  and  around  all  I  knew.  It 
made  me  glad  and  mad  at  the  same  time.  I  had  to  go  apart 
for  hours  to  catch  up. 

In  one  of  these  departures,  I  went  through  the  city  of  Chifu, 
at  least  the  inner  native  quarter.  Grant's  most  recent  talk  was 
straining  my  faculties  at  the  time.  It  was  not  only  unassimi- 
lated,  but  still  alive  in  my  mind.  This  within,  and  the  stench 
and  horror  of  the  native  city  playing  from  without,  made  the 
incident  queer,  to  say  the  least. 

I  walked  in  a  hush — of  time  and  space — all  around  me  a 
dream.  I  went  back  at  dark  to  Mrs.  Cabot's  English  boarding- 
house  on  the  cliffs  above  the  harbor  and  wrote  the  story  of 
the  afternoon.  Grant  was  in  the  room.  I  read  it  to  him  and 
he  said  it  was  good.  Roswell  Field  of  The  Chicago  Evening 
Post  said  it  was  the  best  newspaper  story  that  came  out  of 
that  war  in  Asia.  At  least  I  was  told  this.  I  never  saw  the 
Chifu  story  in  print  that  I  can  remember. 

Still  I  didn't  know  anything  about  the  thing  explicitly 
called  reincarnation,  though  a  friend  in  The  Detroit  Free 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

Press  told  me  I  was  writing  it.  This  was  James  Barr,  brother 
of  Robert  Barr.  He  referred  to  some  articles  I  was  doing  for 
the  Sunday  paper,  and  what  he  had  to  say,  he  whispered.  Re- 
incarnation was  a  thing  to  whisper,  down  town,  in  those  days. 
He  gave  me  a  letter  to  a  theosophical  society  and  went  to 
a  meeting  that  same  night.  There  was  a  red  light  at  the  door 
— that  is,  a  red  pane  with  a  light  behind.  I  held  the  letter  of 
introduction  in  my  hand,  and  saw,  behind  the  curtains,  a  circle 
of  middle-aged  men  and  women  very  silent.  The  leader  took 
the  letter  and  vanished.  I  heard  them  say  that  James  Barr 
had  sent  a  message  to  them.  They  thought  I  was  the  messen- 
ger-boy. That  was  straightened  out,  when  I  lingered.  I 
thought,  of  course,  that  I  was  going  into  some  spiritist  seance, 
but  when  I  finally  got  in,  I  found  a  group  of  serious  and 
friendly  people  talking  about  God  in  a  new  way  and  very  much 
interested  and  genial  about  it — not  at  all  cracked. 

Now,  I  am  not  a  theosophist;  in  fact,  many  good  theoso- 
phists  think  I  have  gone  far  astray  of  late,  but  I  took  a  deep 
drink  of  what  they  had  twenty  years  ago  and  found  it  good. 
Theosophy  is  the  study  of  God  mainly  from  an  ancient  and 
Asiatic  view-point.  It  flooded  into  me  like  a  heavy  spring 
rain  over  a  dry  river-bed;  and  with  it  came  one  of  the  big 
moments  of  amazement  of  life. 

It  had  to  do  with  books  again.    Even  in  nineteen  hundred 


THE     LIFTING     SPINE 

the  majority  o£  people  in  the  West  was  cut  off  from  the  many 
of  the  East,  as  from  another  planet.  I  had  been  reading  all 
my  life — many  thousands  of  books,  and  yet  I  had  never 
touched  anything  like  this.  Here  were  Besant,  Sinnet,  Lead- 
beater — three  who  could  write — yet  they  had  a  new  language, 
a  new  intonation,  new  flora  and  fauna.  If  they  had  written 
badly,  I  would  have  been  able  to  hold  on  to  myself,  but  when 
I  found  them  capable  of  style,  yet  capable  of  forgetting  it,  and 
at  the  same  time  opening  up  Asia  for  me,  as  my  two  journeys 
there  had  not  done  by  any  means — I  had  to  let  go.  It  was  the 
Grant  Wallace  experience  again.  They  had  me  off  my  feet. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 


III 

UNDER  THE  WHITE  LAMP 

OOKS  come  mysteriously  to  a  man  as  he  unfolds. 
You  pick  up  the  things  you  are  ready  for.  Many 
times  a  book  destined  to  mean  a  life-realization  lies 
unopened  for  years  in  a  man's  library.  The  moment  comes 
for  its  taking  forth.  Or  a  friend  brings  the  right  book.  I  have 
said  many  times  that  there  is  no  need  to  go  out  in  search  for 
the  right  thing  to  read. 

The  other  half  of  the  same  mystery  is  that  a  book  cannot  de- 
liver its  message  to  you,  no  matter  how  much  you  read,  until 
you  give  yourself  to  it  in  readiness.  There's  a  book  here  that 
throws  light  on  the  meaning  and  symbolism  of  the  Apostle's 
Creed;  another  that  illuminates  the  Revelation  of  Saint  John. 
The  churches  have  struggled  to  explain  these  matters,  but 
have  not  touched  these  two  books  which  would  help  so  much. 
Yet  these  are  not  rare  parchments  nor  isolated  volumes.  They 
are  emphatically  in  the  world,  but  the  churches  that  need 
them  most  bring  against  them  preconceived  opinion  en  masse ; 
from  such  the  magic  lies  concealed.  There  is  an  occult  saying 
that  a  man's  master  is  always  ready  when  the  man  is — but 
that  the  man  must  go  half  way  to  meet  him.  This  going 
forth  to  find  the  master  signifies  again  the  reverence  and  re- 


UNDER      THE      WHITE     LAMP 

ceptivity  which  must  be  brought  to  a  great  book  before  it 
unfolds. 

The  study  of  oriental  philosophy  and  literature  cleaned  up 
my  behaviour  for  a  time.  I  did  without  meat,  read  theo- 
sophical  literature  five  or  seven  hours  a  day,  and  incidentally 
wrote  a  long  story  which  I  believed  would  prepare  the  nup- 
tials of  the  East  and  the  West.  I  was  thin  and  white  and 
brittle  from  the  deep  burns  of  enthusiasm. 

There  was  a  wise  critic  who  handled  an  earlier  book  of 
mine.  He  said  that  Comfort  was  always  intoxicated — either 
with  the  Idea  of  God,  or  Romance,  or  Plain  Alcohol.  Early 
days,  at  least,  furnished  reason  for  this  report.  I  hadn't 
been  selling  anything.  Besant — Sinnet — Leadbeater  had 
spoiled  my  work  for  the  markets.  They  were  in  my  stuff. 
Magazine  editors  who  had  been  watching  a  young  man  who 
could  write  field  action  with  some  "punch,"  were  snorting 
now  over  the  copy  all  shot  to  pieces  with  a  new  religion.  As  a 
matter  of  truth  about  this  influence,  I  explain  that  I  sold  more 
stories  at  twenty-two  than  I  did  at  twenty-seven. 

I  took  the  long  story  manuscript  to  New  York  after  seven 
austere  months.  Having  placed  it  on  the  prospective  pub- 
lisher's desk,  I  went  further  about  the  Lord's  business  by 
calling  on  a  group  of  young  mystics  under  Harold  Percival  up 
Lenox  way.  They  were  wonderful  young  men — one  a  jewel- 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

salesman,  another  a  broker,  another  a  surgeon — all  doing 
"down-here"  tasks  with  excellence,  as  I  understood,  and  all 
far  deeper  students  than  I.  Under  their  white  lamp  my  story 
was  told — how  I  meant  to  sink  the  East  into  the  West  through 
a  literature  of  the  East  and  West.  They  listened  and  admired. 

I  was  very  happy.  They  suggested  that  I  eat  meat— that 
I  would  do  better  work  if  I  did.*  They  represented  that  it 
was  a  mistake  to  think  that  a  man  should  neglect  the  world, 
just  because  he  was  called  of  God.  They  explained  that  they 
had  tried  it ;  that  whole  schools  of  yogis  had  tried  it  in  India ; 
that  it  meant  retracing  after  going  a  certain  distance ;  that  the 
mere  fact  that  we  carry  a  hundred  odd  pounds  apiece  should 
be  sufficient  suggestion  that  we  make  flesh  do  well  here  in  the 
dimension  it  belongs  to.  They  were  genuinely  fine  in  explain- 
ing my  disease. 

I  found  Grant  Wallace  in  New  York.  We  sat  down  together 
in  a  studio  in  Lower  Fifth  Avenue — on  the  floor,  just  as  we 
would  have  done  on  Japanese  matting.  Many  hours.  I  told 
him  a  lot  that  Percival's  young  men  had  told  me  about  divine 
laws  and  how  I  was  going  to  put  this  new  stuff  into  America — 
into  American  fiction — how  this  was  my  job,  how  clearly  I 
saw  it.  I  know  of  no  more  gentle  heart  than  Grant's.  I  forgot 


*I  tried  this  out  afterward,  but  of  course  it  proved  a  mistake. 
Those  young  questers  under  Percival  have  doubtless  found  it  so. 


UNDER      THE      WHITE     LAMP 

during  the  stretches  of  our  communion — that  it  was  he  who 
had  first  brought  me  these  things.  He  didn't  remind.  He 
listened  and  laughed  and  patted  my  knee,  and  when  we  were 
exhausted,  we  rolled  into  a  blanket  together  quite  as  before. 
.  .  .  Dickie  Barrie  joined  us  the  next  day,  Port  Arthur  Barrie 
— Dickie  on  a  shoestring,  when  I  parted  from  him  in  Japan — 
come  back  famous,  having  lived  and  loved  Nogi,  and  camped 
and  ridden  for  many  months  with  brave  old  Frederick  Villiers. 

Grant  had  a  desk  at  The  Sun.  Barrie  had  a  desk  in  every 
magazine  office  in  New  York  and  was  selling  all  he  wrote  at 
from  five  to  fifty  cents  the  word.  Barrie  fled,  but  I  pinned 
Grant,  making  the  picture  over  and  over  again  of  impregnat- 
ing my  country  with  the  Asiatic  consciousness. 

"But  don't  forget  your  humor,"  Grant  said. 

"Humor,  man,"  I  answered.    "This  is  a  serious  matter." 

"I  know,  only  don't  go  about  it  seriously.  You  see,  a  man 
can  ride  right  up  to  the  Throne  on  humor " 

Always  gentle,  this  Grant.  All  I  could  repeat  was  that  it 
wasn't  in  the  cards  for  me  to  fail.  .  .  .  You  see,  I  didn't 
allow  that  anybody  else  was  to  help  in  the  redemption  work. 
I  was  going  to  do  it  alone.  My  country  needed  it  badly. 

Meanwhile,  in  New  York,  I  waited  for  the  report  on  the 
manuscript.  After  two  or  three  days  with  Grant,  I  called  at 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

the  editor's  office  and  was  told  kindly  that  the  manuscript  was 
spoiled  by  a  deluge  of  unbaked  philosophy.  Those  were 
friends  of  mine  in  that  office.  Will  Irwin  was  there,  but  it 
was  Viola  Roseboro  who  was  delegated  to  impart  to  me  how 
rotten  my  stuff  was  getting.  No  one  could  have  done  it  more 
sweetly.  ...  I  couldn't  get  the  humor  working  without 
help  then.  I  went  out  in  the  street  and  began  to  drift.  I 
ended  up  in  the  Battery  with  some  soldiers  met  in  Porto  Rico 
long  since.  .  .  . 

The  days  were  hot,  the  drift  hotter.  Grant  was  looking  for 
me,  but  I  was  far — singing  along  on  the  old  rum-trail  after 
seven  months  of  abstinence,  seven  months  of  winnowing  out 
the  blood  and  iron.  The  "white  line"  took  me  like  a  storm. 
I  saw  as  I  never  saw  before.  I  saw  everything,  but  I  could 
not  feel  fast  enough.  I  lost  the  manuscript.  I  lost  the  sol- 
diers. I  lost  Grant  and  Dickie  Barrie.  The  drift  took  me 
from  one  end  of  Manhattan  to  the  other.  A  bar-tender  gave 
me  a  nickel  to  get  from  West  Farms  to  the  studio  in  Lower 
Fifth  Avenue,  but  I  was  so  dry  after  making  the  touch  that 
I  took  a  drink  and  started  to  walk.  That  was  the  smallest 
glass  of  beer  in  the  world.  On  the  way  I  remembered  my 
friends  under  the  white  lamp.  "I  will  arise  and  go  to  my 
friends,"  I  said. 

They  took  me  in.  I  shall  always  remember  that.  A  few 
days  before  I  was  their  guest — all  clean  and  white,  telling 


UNDER      THE      WHITE     LAMP 

them  quietly  how  I  meant  to  change  the  world.  I  had  even 
seen  the  advantage  of  knowing  less  than  they  did,  as  I  began 
the  big  task — for  cannot  the  neophyte  teach  the  many  better 
than  the  master  who  may  have  forgotten  the  initial  steps  so 
far  behind  him?  And  now  I  was  more  like  a  thing  swept  up 
from  the  streets,  after  three  or  four  days  of  drift — unwashed, 
unshaven,  half-mad  from  deep  drink,  the  one-eyed  crocodile  of 
the  Aquarium  pictured  in  my  fancy,  every  time  I  closed  my 
eyes. 

And  their  house  was  so  clean.  A  soiled  man  who  has  been 
clean  has  no  front  in  the  presence  of  cleanliness.  Even  they 
could  not  contain  the  extremes  I  was  made  of.  ...  They 
gave  me  alcohol  to  drink,  water  to  bathe  in,  and  clean  sheets 
to  lie  between — but  I  could  not  rest.  The  crocodile  came  even 
there.  The  vague  God  I  had  erected  was  very  far  indeed, 
but  not  so  far  as  I  thought.  I  see  that  now. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 


IV 
LOVE  AND  DEATH 

MAN  has  a  surface  and  a  secret  consciousness.  It  is 
like  a  vast  estate  which  we  cultivate  field  by  field. 
Mainly  men  only  open  their  kitchen-gardens,  but  the 
artist  dimly  apprehends  glades  and  glens,  and  if  he  is  lucky 
and  balanced  enough  he  finds  certain  sun-washed  silent  hills. 
That  fine  group  of  lyric  poets — Byron,  Burns,  Poe,  Shelley, 
Keats — opened  up  sick  swamps  and  found  them  too  hard  to 
drain,  yet  they  were  continually  going  back  to  them,  dwelling 
in  a  kind  of  helpless  wonder  upon  those  fevered  margins,  until 
the  murk  and  illness  of  the  bottomlands  was  like  a  shadow  in 
their  eyes,  even  when  they  sought  the  eminences  of  their  own 
being. 

The  mystic  has  been  called  many  things,  but  he  is  really 
the  man  of  a  single  transcending  secret — that  there  is  one 
light  in  himself,  and  in  every  one  of  us,  which,  if  developed, 
is  capable  of  raying  out  over  all  our  lands.  He  finds  that 
there  is  no  recess  nor  abyss  of  his  nature  too  deep  or  dark  or 
fearsomely  tenanted  for  this  light  to  cleanse  and  sweeten. 
He  learns  that  by  developing  this  light,  he  is  working  from  his 
own  highest  point,  also  from  the  central  point  of  his  own 
being;  that  its  ray  can  penetrate  the  thickest  forest  and  dif- 


LOVE    AND     DEATH 

fuse  its  light  into  the  blackest  ravine,  leaving  a  cathedral  won- 
der there.  He  sees  his  estate  as  one,  and  as  he  integrates  and 
masters  his  possessions,  his  central  light  becomes  a  land-mark 
over  all  the  province,  and  the  neighboring  planters  use  his 
light  to  order  their  own  possessions. 

Now  it's  a  hard  fact  nailed  that  this  light  in  every  one  of 
us  is  the  secret  of  happiness;  the  "pursuit  of  happiness" 
through  books  and  days  is  at  first  the  quest  and  then  the  quick- 
ening of  this  light.  It's  every  man's  property,  and  the  few  who 
have  touched  it,  know  the  "amplitude  of  time"  and  "laugh  at 
the  thing  called  death."  Balzac  wrote  of  it,  "To  live  in  the 
presence  of  great  truths  and  eternal  laws  .  .  .  that  is  what 
keeps  a  man  patient  when  the  world  ignores  him,  and  calm 
and  unspoiled  in  the  world  of  praise." 

The  secret  was  just  touched  for  a  moment  at  a  time  in  cer- 
tain books  up  the  years.  I  don't  mean  in  the  sacred  writings ; 
that's  the  business  of  such  books.  We  are  so  familiar  with 
many  of  the  sacred  sayings  and  their  pointings  of  the  ways 
that  they  have  become  a  patter  upon  our  minds.  To  say  that 
Truth  leads  men  to  happiness  tells  the  whole  story,  but  it 
doesn't  mean  everything  to  us,  in  the  midst  of  detached  affairs 
Down  Here.  It  has  been  said  too  many  times ;  we're  hardened 
to  the  impact  of  it.  I  mean  that  I  touched  the  secret  for  an 
occasional  instant  up  the  years  in  the  books  of  feverish  young 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

questers  in  our  midst — the  ones  who  write  or  paint  or  play  as 
they  hurry  on. 

I  read  a  story  of  Guy  de  Maupassant's.  I  may  not  remember 
the  tale  exactly  for  it  was  long  ago,  but  of  the  spirit  I  am 
sure.  A  young  man  and  woman  met,  and  in  the  sudden  power 
of  each  other,  forgot  all  the  stresses  and  bondages  of  life 
which  were  already  upon  them.  They  vanished  in  a  cloud  of 
scandal.  Thirty  or  forty  years  afterward,  an  old  Frenchman 
who  had  known  the  man  and  woman  at  the  time  of  their  dra- 
matic meeting,  was  traveling  somewhere  in  the  mountains  and 
came  upon  a  cabin  where  an  aged  pair  lived  alone  in  the  wil- 
derness. .  .  .  They  were  silent  together,  full  of  peace  and 
wistfulness. 

The  woman  joined  the  man  in  the  hard  tasks  of  their  rocky 
garden;  the  externals  of  life  were  utterly  simple,  yet  the 
traveler  found  between  the  two,  something  that  all  the  world 
had  not  shown  him  before.  Sometimes  when  he  spoke,  sitting 
between  them  at  the  hearth,  the  man  would  lift  his  eyes  and 
turn  them  slowly  to  the  woman  whose  gaze  would  meet  his  for 
a  moment  steadfastly,  without  any  effort  at  communication, 
but  with  a  calm  and  understanding  that  involved  all  life  and 
seemingly  all  the  past."  There  was  a  fearlessness  in  their  eyes 
that  unmistakably  intimated  a  working  knowledge  of  the  long 
ascending  slopes  ahead,  infinitely  beyond  the  little  mystery 


LOVE    AND     DEATH 

of  death,  so  close  to  one  or  both.  Their  love  was  the  first 
and  last  fact  of  their  lives,  so  that  the  traveler  wondered  at 
their  happiness  in  the  imminence  of  what  men  call  the  end. 
.  .  .  That  story  is  one  that  means  Romance  to  me.  As  I 
recall,  the  traveler  went  his  way,  before  he  remembered  the 
old  story  of  the  two  who  had  fled  together,  and  that  he  had 
seen  the  end  of  the  scandal.  De  Maupassant  called  his  story, 
Happiness. 

Years  ago,  in  Detroit,  there  was  a  beloved  city  editor,  named 
Harry  Hetherington.  He  touched  many  of  us  younger  men 
from  time  to  time,  and  most  of  us  profited  by  the  big  things 
which  he  could  not  say.  One  night  he  gave  me  Andreieff's 
The  Seven  Who  Were  Hanged.  It  was  a  psychological  study 
of  certain  young  revolutionists  awaiting  death,  and  others 
who  were  in  the  death-chamber  with  them.  A  remarkable 
story,  and  to  me  there  was  one  culminating  moment — one  of 
those  moments  in  books  and  days  which  leave  a  man  different. 
.  .  .  A  man  and  woman  standing  together  at  the  last  mo- 
ment, and  their  look  past  the  world  and  the  flesh  and  the  gray 
dawn — directly  into  the  Essential  Loveliness  of  each  other. 

They  saw  something  that  life  here  below  mostly  conceals 
from  us.  They  discovered  that  instant  the  Romance  that  goes 
on  and  on ;  that  the  door  just  ahead  of  them,  which  had  looked 
so  dark,  swung  really  into  a  freer  dimension.  They  knew, 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

standing  together,  that  they  belonged  to  a  bigger  world  than 
they  had  dreamed  of ;  that  they  belonged  to  those  about  them 
in  the  death-cell,  to  the  guards  who  brought  death  to  them, 
to  the  teeming  suffering  myriads  outside — most  of  all  that  they 
belonged  to  each  other. 

I  never  could  get  past  the  need  of  building  something  be- 
tween real  lovers  that  will  help  them  over  the  barrier  called 
Death.  To  me  the  very  awakening  of  the  love-energy  seems 
to  demand  that.  The  countless  deaths  of  soldier-lovers  afield 
in  the  recent  war  would  seem  to  demand  that  the  higher 
octave  of  Romance  be  touched,  at  least,  if  not  played  upon. 
Certainly  there  have  been  many  men  and  women  whose  stately 
mourning  for  one  gone  has  brought  to  them  a  faint  intimation 
of  nearness;  moments  in  which  the  heavens  were  flung  back 
ever  so  little.  It  has  always  seemed  to  me  that  there  could 
be  no  contentment  in  a  real  love  story  in  the  midst  of  the  in- 
finite chances  of  life  and  death,  if  the  love  thing  itself  would 
not  open  something  beyond  the  petty  span  of  things  as  seen  in 
the  flesh. 

.  .  .  One  of  the  finest  romantic  moments  I  ever  lived  in 
a  book  was  in  Maeterlinck's  chapter,  The  Nuptial  Flight  in 
The  Life  of  the  Bee.  s 

There  was  one  night  away  up  in  the  gallery  of  a  Detroit 
theater,  when  I  read  a  little  pamphlet  called,  Hindu  Meta- 


LOVE    AND     DEATH 

physics,  and  an  old  shell  in  my  brain  cracked  open.  I  knew 
then  that  we  were  mainly  doing  things  in  detachment  in  Eu- 
rope and  America;  that  so-called  Science  was  but  a  study  of 
parts,  like  Darwin's  segment  of  evolution,  which  the  great 
man  considered  in  his  superb  concentration  to  be  the  whole 
stretch  of  man's  progress.  I  found  that  in  India  they  had  a 
word  called  "prana,"  which  we  haven't  even  English  for ;  that 
they  mean  by  it,  the  quality  in  air  which  cannot  chemically 
be  analyzed,  but  without  which  no  plant  or  man  or  animal 
can  live. 

It  was  demonstrated  to  me  that  we  move  and  have  our 
being  in  the  atmospheric  cushion  which  rests  upon  the  crust 
of  the  planet,  because  it  contains  this  quality  named  "prana" — 
the  breath  within  the  breath.  The  little  pamphlet  was  crowded 
with  matters  as  revelatory  as  this,  quite  a  number  of  which 
statements  have  since  been  demonstrated  in  our  Western 
world.  I  swung  again  in  that  reading  altogether  loose  from 
the  ground,  and  renewed  my  burning  boyish  allegiance  to  all 
that  was  of  the  Orient. 

It  was  a  long  time  after  that  before  I  learned  that  the  East 
has  merely  been  doing  what  we  haven't;  that  the  East  has 
been  holding  to  the  synthesis,  while  we  have  been  at  work  in 
analysis ;  that  the  East  has  clung  to  the  whole,  while  we  have 
been  doing  the  lonely  cold  work  with  the  parts;  in  fact,  that 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

the  East  is  little  better  off  than  we  are,  but  that  both  East 
and  West  have  ineffable  gifts  each  for  the  other  on  every  plane 
of  being. 

It  was  long  before  I  came  in  from  eccentric  yearnings  and 
gropings  to  realize  that  the  man  who  finds  intimations  of 
immortality  in  the  primrose  on  his  path,  is  working  quite  as 
importantly  in  the  big  scheme  of  things,  as  the  sage  on  the 
roof  of  the  world,  who  has  opened  his  skylights  to  commune 
with  a  passing  Stranger,  too  lustrous  for  mere  man's  optic 
nerves  to  delineate.  In  fact,  the  intimations  of  immortality 
are  quite  as  significant  in  the  primrose  as  in  the  archangel; 
and  it  is  as  truly  essential  for  us  to  perceive  the  majesty 
in  miniature  as  to  expand  our  souls  to  contain  celestial  con- 
figurations. I  can  find  the  dear  care  of  being  and  the  love- 
tokens  of  an  awakening  spirit  quite  as  evident  in  Amiel's 
Journal  and  Jeffery's  Story  of  my  Heart — as  in  the  Mahabarata 
or  The  Book  of  Job. 

It  is  but  a  step  farther,  and  just  as  sure  a  step,  to  perceive 
the  emerging  prophets  in  the  lives  of  those  tortured  lyric 
poets ;  to  know  that  Poe  and  Burns,  Byron,  Shelley  and  Keats 
were  just  as  surely  making  their  patterns  straight,  as  the 
apparently  more  ordered  questers  in  the  monasteries  of  Vindya 
or  High  Himalaya.  In  fact,  the  mysticism  of  the  man,  Slocum, 
who  built  his  boat  of  pasture-oak,  and  sailed  it  alone  around 


LOVE    AND     DEATH 


the  waters  of  the  world,  communing  with  his  God  in  the  great 
voyage;  and  Appleseed  Johnny,  who  planted  orchards  ahead 
of  the  pioneers,  and  John  Brown,  whose  soul  is  still  marching 
on — such  mysticism  is  as  magic  to  one  who  sees,  as  that  of 
the  lofty  devotees  who  have  transmuted  every  passion  and 
desire  and  appetite  into  one  great  Yearning  for  union  with 
their  Lords. 

.  .  .  In  fact,  I  see  the  austere  yogis  coming  down  from 
the  hills  to  toil  and  endure  the  low  vibrations  of  the  plains  and 
cities,  quite  as  surely  as  we  of  the  west  shall  later  fix  our 
knowledges  and  cool  our  distractions  in  the  mountains  of  the 
spirit.  It  is  good  to  go  to  the  mountains,  but  just  as  good  to 
make  one's  place  at  the  water-levels.  Zarathustra  goes  up, 
but  comes  down  again.  Moses  and  the  Lord  Christ  go  up 
into  the  mountains,  but  come  down  again,  covering  their  faces 
from  the  many,  until  they  get  adjusted  to  the  pressures  of  the 
plain.  Peter,  James  and  John  wanted  to  build  their  tent  upon 
the  Mount  of  Transfiguration,  but  their  Master  smiled  and  led 
them  down  again.  It  is  the  abysses  as  well  as  the  peaks  which 
make  the  scenery  of  the  Himalayas;  matter  as  well  as  spirit 
for  the  experiments  of  our  laboratories;  the  East  and  West 
which  make  our  world. 

The  value  of  woman  is  that  she  is  unlike  man.  Her  glory 
is  ruined  by  the  man  who  tries  to  possess  her  and  make  her 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

like  himself.  It  is  only  when  he  sets  her  free  that  she  comes 
to  him  gladly  with  effulgence  in  her  eyes.  In  fact,  it  is  only 
the  free  woman  who  can  give  herself.  In  all  their  fighting 
alone  and  apart — man  and  woman,  catholic  and  protestant, 
heart  and  mind,  mystic  and  occultist,  East  and  West,  have 
gathered  together  great  treasures  and  powers,  each  for  the 
completion  of  the  other. 

.  .  .  The  New  Race  sees  the  globe  in  one  piece,  night 
and  day  as  parts  of  the  same  movement,  the  Innermost  and 
the  Uppermost  one;  the  doctrines  of  Immanence  and  Emana- 
tions, as  the  systole  and  diastole  of  one  Quest.  Plato  and  Aris- 
totle are  not  forever  incompatibles,  any  more  than  Baptist 
and  Congregational  in  the  weaving  tolerance  of  the  New. 


FIGHTING      BACK 


V 
FIGHTING  BACK 

ERGSON  and  Eucken  and  Ouspensky,  three  Euro- 
pean middlemen  whose  great  work  lies  between  the 
East  and  West,  between  the  Old  and  the  New,  might 
have  hurried  me  back  into  the  Western  balances,  but  I  did  not 
read  them  at  the  time  of  my  thrall  for  things  Eastern.  I 
remember  a  book  at  that  time,  a  book  about  women,  by  the 
brilliant  young  apostate,  Weininger.  Its  flashing  subtleties 
and  sophistries  carried  me  deeper  into  the  drift,  but  the  actual 
needs  for  life  in  the  world,  sooner  or  later  brought  me  back. 
The  fact  is,  I  never  would  have  been  able  to  make  the  spiritual 
'and  the  natural,  or  the  East  and  West,  work  together  at  all  in 
one  body,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  needs  of  daily  bread. 

The  struggle  is  pictured  well  in  my  numerous  journeys  to 
New  York  from  some  haven  of  quiet  in  the  middle-west.  The 
big  town  had  hurt  me  so  many  times  that  it  came  to  mean 
Hell.  I  would  go  there  with  a  book  manuscript  in  a  confi- 
dence that  required  no  return  ticket,  thoroughly  warmed  and 
self-psychologized,  after  months  of  bearing  work  in  my  own 
atmosphere,  all  personal  magnetism  and  thought-force  inno- 
cently enveloping  the  story  which  the  nearest  editor  would 
deliver  from  me,  leaving  the  author  little  more  alive  than  his 
still-born. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

It  was  hard  for  me  not  to  blame  the  people  and  place  of 
these  parturitions.  Broke,  I  would  have  to  find  work  on  a 
newspaper  in  order  to  get  straightened  out,  after  the  months 
of  concentration  on  the  "priceless"  task.  In  fact,  I  frequently 
had  to  go  to  work  in  New  York  in  order  to  negotiate  trans- 
portation to  the  particular  garden-spot  of  the  middle-west, 
where  another  novel  cried  for  birth.  In  the  midst  of  peace 
and  production  again,  I  would  slowly  and  surely  lose  the 
memory  of  Hell ;  I  would  forget  all  that  New  York  had  taught 
me  last  about  keeping  my  stuff  within  the  range  of  the  public 
mind.  Increasingly,  as  the  weeks  drove  on,  I  would  follow 
my  own  tastes  as  to  what  a  novel  should  be,  and  lose  the 
clutch  of  actuality  which  the  market  demanded. 

Left  alone  too  long  in  the  shop,  I  always  drifted  out  of 
touch  with  the  American  spirit.  So  the  struggle  of  those  years 
was  less  to  make  my  stuff  good  enough  for  the  market  stand- 
ard, than  to  keep  it  down  within  the  reach  of  the  many — 
with  all  the  wings  of  metaphysics  tugging  from  above.  But 
New  York  always  broke  these  pinions.  The  editors  remarked 
that  I  did  physical  adventures  rather  well,  but  got  maudlin 
over  spiritual  adventures. 

I  fought  back,  but  the  harder  I  fought,  the  farther  I  was 
pushed  from  the  chahce  of  getting  across.  I  hated  hard,  but 
hate  spoils  everything.  The  man  who  hates  has  a  sick  spot 
on  his  mental  surface.  Hate  comes  back  to  the  hater.  Yet 


FIGHTING      BACK 

it  is  energy.  Hatred  isn't  so  alarming  as  impotence.  The 
great  hater  is  potentially  the  great  lover.  The  man  who  loves 
sees  the  object  more  in  the  real  sense  and  less  in  the  critical 
and  personal  sense.  The  man  who  hates  sees  the  object  alto- 
gether in  the  critical  and  personal,  and  misses  the  super-per- 
sonal reality.  It  is  impossible  to  hate  anyone  whom  you  really 
understand.  If  you  had  come  the  same  road  of  the  one  you 
hate,  you  would  be  as  he  is.  It  is  the  opposite  to  hatred 
which  is  the  key  to  understanding  and  the  clue  to  the  thing 
we  are  after,  which  is  Happiness. 

A  man  who  neither  loves  nor  hates  is  sick  spiritually.  That 
indifference  called  Moksin  by  the  Hindus  has  been  well  tried 
out.  If  pushed  too  far,  it  results  in  atrophy  of  a  deeper  vitality 
than  that  which  has  to  do  with  the  body.  I  have  hated  indi- 
viduals and  countries  and  societies  and  editors  and  myself. 
Finally  I  indulged  the  dissipation  in  hating  abstractions,  like 
Ignorance.  The  queer  thing  about  hating  Ignorance  is  that 
you  are  called  back  to  the  hatred  of  it  in  the  individual. 

If  you  hate  Ignorance  in  the  individual  man,  you  tighten 
his  trouble  and  attract  him  to  you  with  his  slowly-rising  hos- 
tility. There  is  nothing  to  that.  A  man  watches  it  work  for 
a  little  while;  then  comes  back  to  the  changeless  truth  that 
the  main  trouble  with  the  hater  is  his  own  insides.  As  he 
cleanses  and  corrects  these,  understanding  is  gained  which 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 


makes  hatred  impossible.  Driven  to  the  last  ditch  by  the 
hound  of  heaven,  a  man  is  forced  to  love  something,  a  girl, 
a  phantom,  a  family,  a  friend,  a  dog— or  the  dank  earth  will 
get  him  right  there. 

One  of  the  last  things  I  hated  was  the  Old  in  everything. 
I  had  given  my  allegiance  to  the  phantom  called  the  New 
Race,  but  I  didn't  get  the  phantom  to  stand  still  and  be  en- 
fleshed  until  I  reached  calm  on  the  subject  of  the  elders,  whom 
I  had  called  "the  bearded  generation."  One  sees  later  that 
the  Old  is  the  essential  matrix  in  which  the  New  is  born. 

It  is  well  to  consider  that  the  Law  works  both  ways.  Love 
comes  back  to  the  lover,  and  now  we  are  touching  the  quest 
again.  .  .  .  We  are  shut  off  from  each  other  in  detachment, 
but  we  really  all  want  the  same  thing.  Everyone  whom  we 
have  learned  to  trust  tells  the  same  story — Hermes,  Orpheus, 
Gautama,  Jesus,  Lao-tse,  Zoroaster,  Socrates,  our  own  Walt 
Whitman  and  his  great  disciple,  Edward  Carpenter. 

Personally  and  nationally  we  want  the  same  thing.  It  is 
only  the  illusion  of  detachment  which  makes  us  see  it  differ- 
ently. What  is  essentially  good  for  America  is  good  for  New 
South  Wales.  The  same  is  true  in  every  commercial  and 
romantic  contract.  Two  men  prosper  in  business  so  long  as 
they  are  out  after  the  same  thing;  man  and  woman  pull  to- 
gether, just  so  long  as  they  lose  the  pain  of  their  own  wants 


FIGHTING      BACK 

and  aim  as  one  to  a  single  goal  beyond.  In  the  higher  romance 
it  becomes  absolutely  essential  to  work  together  toward  one 
spiritual  point.  The  increase  of  force  rends  two  beings  who 
have  breathed  Open  Country  together  and  fall  back  into  the 
tight  dimension  of  me-and-mine. 

These  things  are  hard  to  see  in  detachment.  The  pith  of 
them  has  to  be  accepted  on  faith  until  it  can  be  seen,  but 
every  effort  a  man  makes  to  hold  to  it  is  moral  calisthenics  of 
a  fine  type.  It  is  in  the  great  expansions  of  life,  in  moments 
of  high  happiness  or  hard-driven  from  pain,  that  most  of  us 
get  our  first  glimpses  of  the  truth  which  heals. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

VI 
A  FEW  FINE  THINGS 

I  AM  writing  this  now  in  a  room  practically  devoid  of 
books — making  no  effort  to  remember.  The  names 
of  my  big  moments  of  reading  come  one  by  one 
without  external  reference.  I  may  forget  many;  could  hardly 
hope  to  touch  all.  In  early  days,  again  and  again,  I  have  said 
about  some  forgotten  volume,  "This  is  the  best  book  I  ever 
read."  I  know  I  said  this  about  Bulwer  Lytton's  Zanoni, 
and  possibly  about  his  Strange  Story;  still  earlier,  of  a  cer- 
tainty about  Camille  and  Three  Musketeers.  For  a  time  I 
was  right  to  dwell  in  Thomas  Hardy's  thin  watery  lights 
and  deep  windless  glooms,  but  the  Waverley  novels  and  I 
have  yet  to  meet  at  the  exact  right  time. 

I  never  drew  unqualified  inspiration  from  Shakespeare, 
though  I  have  often  tried  the  plays  and  sonnets.  One  thinks 
at  the  same  time  of  Bacon,  from  whose  ethical  essences  I 
have  taken  real  profit ;  but  even  more  from  the  balanced  coun- 
sels of  the  noble  Roman,  Aurelius,  tough-fibered  and  fine- 
fibered  enough  to  be  an  Emperor  and  remain  a  man.  In  the 
same  thought  comes  to  me  the  spiritual  faculties  kindled 
within  from  the  self-mastery  of  the  slave,  Epictetus.  That 
little  volume  I  kept  warm  a  long  time  against  my  hip. 

Some  of  Browning's  things  I  have  actually  found  intact  in 


A    FEW    FINE     THINGS 

my  memory  from  much  conning;  but  I  have  always  wished 
that  he  had  been  a  poor  man,  compelled  to  meet  the  markets 
for  daily  bread.  That  would  have  forced  him  to  make  words 
work  better.  In  spite  of  this,  he  pulled  a  love  from  me  that 
made  him  unfold  for  my  inner  consciousness.  He  knew  some- 
thing of  what  a  lover  means  which  the  world  has  still  to  learn. 
I  would  have  adored  the  lover  in  Dante  for  one  single  page  of 
his  great  heart  story,  and  when  I  read  that  Beatrice  said 
to  him: 

"I  will  make  you  forever  a  citizen  of  that  Rome  whereof 

the  Christ  is  a  Roman "  I  could  hold  no  more  of  sheer 

Romance ! 

Many  of  the  great  moments  of  the  great  ones,  I  learned 
through  their  disciples — of  Goethe  from  Carlyle;  of  Socrates 
from  Plato ;  of  H.  P.  B.,  who  still  has  much  for  young  America, 
from  Annie  Besant.  For  a  time  the  disciples  looked  so  bright 
in  the  foreground  that  I  missed  the  looming  masters  behind 
them,  but  one's  eyes  straighten  with  the  years.  For  a  long 
time  I  hated  Paradise  Lost  because  of  its  seeming  orthodox 
adhesions,  but,  as  I  loosened  the  adhesions  from  my  own 
mind,  I  came  to  realize  that  Milton  was  blind  on  the  outside  for 
a  very  good  reason ;  that  he  had  caught  something  of  the  Big 
Story  of  the  Gulf  which  the  best  men  of  the  here  and  now  will 
do  well  to  look  at  again.  Moreover,  as  Mencken  says,  "he 
could  write  like  hell." 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

I  have  taken  more  worth  from  Coventry  Patmore's  two 
stanzas  called  Departure,  than  from  all  the  Shakespeare  plays ; 
more,  I  think,  of  the  throb  of  life  from  The  Ballad  of  Reading 
Gaol.  As  a  little  child  I  was  thrilled  "to  a  peak"  when  a  room- 
ful began  to  sing: 

"Mine  eyes  have  seen  the  glory  of  the  Coming  of  the 
Lord " 

Oscar  Wilde  touched  the  same  vibration  in  the  Ballad,  and 
this  is  the  very  core-vibration  of  the  "Marseillaise."  ...  I 
wonder  that  more  people  do  not  know  one  of  the  loveliest 
things  ever  made  in  America,  the  "Hymn  to  the  Marshes,"  by 
Sidney  Lanier — a  countryman  of  ours  who  saw  the  great  Writ- 
ing on  the  ground  which  is  the  Western  way — the  same  Writ- 
ing which  the  Easterns  read  in  the  Stars. 


STARS     AND     BEES 


VII 

» 

STARS  AND  BEES 

LOVE  the  men  in  books  and  life  who  are  groping 
f°r  the  same  things  as  we  are.  They  called  Blake  and 
Bohme  mad,  but  cults  are  forming  today  and  books 
are  written  about  them.  They  pushed  their  skylights  open  a 
bit.  They  couldn't  bring  down  all  they  saw,  but  we  treasure 
the  words  which  they  formed  in  open  consciousness.  The 
more  we  know,  the  less  vague  appear  their  words,  and  the 
more  we  realize  that  theirs  was  a  magnificent  madness.  In 
the  white  fire  of  their  awakened  faculties,  they  looked  down 
from  the  mystery  and  saw  more  than  flesh  in  faces.  They 
saw  the  sons  of  God  in  the  eyes  of  passing  men.  No  trouble 
to  be  a  Democrat  after  that,  for  the  heresy  of  separateness  is 
forever  broken. 

That  fine  living  Irishman,  A.  E.,  has  told  the  same  over  and 
over  again: 

"This  mood  hath  known  all  beauty,  for  it  sees 

O'erwhelmed  majesties 
In  these  pale  forms,  and  kingly  crowns  of  gold 

On  brows  no  longer  bold, 

And  through  the  shadowy  terrors  of  their  hell 
The  love  for  which  they  fell " 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

A.  E.  is  talking  about  men — the  men  of  the  street.  And 
more  he  is  getting  it  down,  so  that  those  of  us  who  haven't 
time  to  make  poetry  or  dream  dreams  for  a  living,  are  unable 
to  get  away  from  the  things  he  sees — the  same  that  all  the 
great  ones  have  seen.  It's  the  work  of  the  workmen  of  the 
New  Age  to  bring  it  down  to  matter  straight — to  make  the 
dream  come  true  in  matter,  so  that  even  the  man  who  runs 
must  catch  his  breath  and  remember  his  birthright.  The  war 
has  done  much  to  make  the  myriads  stop  and  look  and  listen. 
So  many  who  have  lost  the  dearest  thing  here — want  to  know 
what  is  on  the  Other  Side. 

The  Spoon  River  man  gave  me  an  extension  of  conscious- 
ness ;  and  young  and  old  in  this  settlement  have  passed  around 
James  Stephens'  Crock  of  Gold,  looking  at  the  world  differently 
before  and  after.  The  breath  quickens  in  the  same  passage  of 
thought  to  Algernon  Blackwood's  stories.  Here  are  three  big 
workmen  of  the  transition.  ...  I  have  read  James  Op- 
penheim's  little  verses  called  Annie  in  the  same  evening  with 
some  of  the  finest  pages  of  rhythmic  print ;  and  Alfred  Henry 
Lewis'  Wolfville  Stories  to  the  same  group  who  believe  Ro- 
main  Rolland's  Jean  Christophe  to  be  one  of  the  highest  best 
productions  of  any  artist  any  time.  Every  day  that  big  French- 
man shows  his  light  in  the  world,  which  is  to  say  that  he  helps 
to  uncover  the  light  intrinsic  in  all  men.  Ellen  Key's  Love 
and  Marriage  was  a  real  book  to  me  ten  years  ago,  and  one 


STARS     AND     BEES 

of  the  strangest  and  most  potent  things  which  I  ever  held  in 
hand  was  the  Poems  of  Aleister  Crowley. 

Much  enlightenment  came  to  me  from  The  Perfect  Way, 
The  Aquarian  Gospel,  Hartman's  Paracelsus  and  Magic,  White 
and  Black.  The  last  has  been  the  final  object  dropped  a  hun- 
dred nights  before  turning  off  the  reading  lamp.  There  were 
two  winters  when  I  read  very  little  besides  Astronomy,  and 
almost  as  long  when  the  prime  interest  of  life  to  me  was  Bees 
in  books  and  fields. 

I  used  to  own  walls  of  volumes,  but  I  could  do  with  nine 
now,  not  counting  the  Bible,  which  is  the  book  of  all  for  our 
day.  Yes,  I  would  keep  these  and  let  the  others  go — nine  great 
little  books  of  the  world  to  me.  Sometime  I  want  them  in 
leather  on  India  paper — so  that  the  whole  nine  could  be  held 
in  one  hand — The  Yoga  Sutras  of  Patanjali,*  Imitation  of 
Christ,  Bhagavad  Gita,  Voice  of  the  Silence,  Light  on  the 
Path,  Impersonal  Life,  Thus  Spake  Zarathustra,  Leaves  of 
Grass  and  Towards  Democracy. 


*Chas.  Johnston's  edition  preferably. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 


VIII 
THE  MYSTIC  ROAD 

GODAY  I  can  see  innumerable  intimations  of  the  larger 
consciousness   breaking   through   the   minds    of   the 
many,  little  touches  of  the  real  in  fiction  and  moving 
picture,  sentences  of  deep  reality,  themes  which  contain  actual 
correspondences  of  spirit  and  matter.    Out  of  an  old  drawer, 
recently,  I  plucked  forth  a  much  worn  copy  of  Bucke's  Cosmic 
Consciousness.    It  had  literally  been  read  to  pieces  and  was 
bound  away  like  letter-sheets  sacred  to  someone's  beloved. 

Breathlessly,  ten  years  ago,  I  went  about  making  those 
revelations  my  own.  It  was  the  main  subject  and  object  in 
those  days  to  break  with  a  crash  into  the  larger  field  of  con- 
sciousness. I  remember  how  the  term  World-man  shook  me, 
when  it  first  appeared  on  copy  of  mine.  "Ahead  on  the  road 
are  the  World-men" — that  little  sentence  looped  over  into 
Canaan  like  an  announcement  that  we  were  coming.  It  meant 
all  that  "worldly  man"  does  not. 

That  enthusiasm  was  all  very  well,  though  I  have  learned 
since  that  Enlightenment  comes  as  it  is  earned;  that  a  man  is 
very  far  from  it  when  he  is  "fixing"  to  arrive;  that  it  cannot 
come,  in  fact,  to  fit  the  mind's  conception,  because  the  mind 
works  in  three-space  and  It  works  in  four.  All  this  self-con- 


THE    MYSTIC    ROAD 

scious  stuff  is  part  of  the  mountain  of  matter  which  must  be 
renounced,  before  the  Day  breaks  and  the  shadows  disappear. 
One  makes  his  body  ready  to  endure  an  incredible  increase  of 
power.  This  making  ready  is  the  conquest  of  the  mind  and 
feelings. 

One  may  have  Enlightenment,  if  he  pays  the  price  and  this 
price  looks  steep  in  the  beginning.  It  means  to  give  up  every 
whim,  habit,  eccentricity,  failing,  appetite  and  predilection.  It 
means,  if  one  is  called,  to  give  up  money,  name,  house,  lover, 
child.  It  means  to  be  ready  to  become  as  nothing  in  the  eyes 
of  men.  The  Book  of  Job  is  one  story  of  the  coming  of  En- 
lightenment. One  laughs  at  the  need  of  celibacy  and  austerity, 
before  one  is  called,  but  head-on  in  the  dark,  one  finds  himself 
in  the  midst  of  restraints  and  denials  which  would  have  looked 
like  fanaticism  to  himself  a  while  back. 

The  time  comes  when  he  forgets  that  he  is  being  restrained 
and  denied.  He  refuses  to  make  a  single  mind-image  of  his 
reward.  For  a  long  time  he  appears  less  than  he  was,  as  a 
mind-power  and  as  a  man  among  men.  This  is  because  he  has 
repudiated  all  that  he  knew  on  the  plane  of  generation,  and  is 
not  yet  ready  to  use  the  wisdom,  love  and  power  of  the  Self. 
This  is  a  sorry  time. 

Bucke's  book  was  good  for  me,  but  I  do  not  believe  that  real 
Enlightenment,  or  Illumination,  as  he  called  it,  comes  in  the 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

way  he  pointed  out.  I  think  it  is  more  like  a  wick  being 
turned  up,  the  slightest  fraction  of  a  turn  at  a  time.  Each 
turn  is  an  extension  of  consciousness.  It  never  fails  to  come 
the  instant  the  poor  man-trained  objective  consciousness  gets 
decent  and  healthy  enough  to  stand  it. 

There  are  many  tests  and  ordeals.  One  must  learn  to  dis- 
criminate between  his  mind  which  thinks,  and  the  Voice  within 
which  knows.  This  is  delicate  work,  and  after  learning  to  hear 
the  Voice,  one  must  know  no  other  god  before  it.  Enlighten- 
ment steals  in  like  the  Dawn,  which  it  is,  after  the  long  dark- 
ness of  preparation  and  purification.  It  comes  softly  as  one 
puts  on  courage  to  do  bravely  in  details  and  to  keep  the 
bravery  hid.  In  fact,  it  is  questionable  to  me  if  a  flash  of  illu- 
mination in  a  mind  not  ready,  is  not  a  great  misfortune.  .  .  . 

Very  recently  there  came  a  memorable  volume — Mysticism, 
by  Evelyn  Underbill,  who  wrote  a  wise  introduction  for  Songs 
of  Kabir,  Tagore's  best  book  to  me.  Mysticism  was  like  find- 
ing greatly  done,  what  one  hoped  to  grow  to  do.  I  read  the 
haunting  names  of  martyrs  and  mystics  whose  words  I  had 
long  searched  for — Suso,  Tauler,  Brother  Lawrence,  Ruys- 
broec,  Eckhart,  Swedenborg,  Catherine  of  Siena,  Catherine 
of  Genoa,  Mme.  Guyon,  Santa  Theresa.  .  .  . 

Twenty-five  years  ago  I  used  to  walk  home  from  school 
with  a  lad  named  Cameron.  There  was  much  time  for  talk. 


THE    MYSTIC    ROAD 

You  may  hardly  believe  it,  but  Cameron  knew  something 
about  most  of  these  names.  For  years  I  remembered  his  story 
of  the  terrible  austerities  of  "the  blessed  Henry  Suso."  No 
one  else  had  ever  uttered  these  names  in  my  hearing,  but  I 
knew  I  should  come  to  them  again.  Here  was  a  valuable 
synthesis  of  all  the  ecstasies  and  actions,  sayings,  confessions, 
renunciations,  exaltations,  contemplations  and  rigors  of  that 
Holy  Company. 

.  .  .  The  intellectualists  keep  us  coherent;  they  keep  us 
fit  and  lean  and  efficacious.  They  are  like  the  friends  a  man 
meets  afield — men  he  learned  to  love,  riding  side  by  side,  fight- 
ing back  to  back — but  the  mystics  are  like  the  women  who 
wait  at  home.  They  are  impassioned  to  say  exactly  what  they 
mean.  That  is  their  service.  They  are  free  from  world  forms ; 
they  dare  to  be  themselves;  finally  they  reach  and  begin  to 
sustain,  through  this  freedom  of  soul,  the  Larger  Conscious- 
ness which  is  the  desired  aim  of  all  good  workmen.  In  that 
freedom,  the  simplest  mind  is  greater  than  the  subtlest  savant. 


BOOKS    AND    DAYS 

IX 
THE  BOOK  OF  THE  HEART 

E  end  of  much  reading  is  an  emerging  into  life.  It 
has  dawned  upon  me  with  amazement  of  late  that  I 
have  practically  ceased  to  read  books ;  that  this  wasn't 
a  whim  or  a  mood,  rather  that  the  great  world  of  books  had 
dropped  away;  life  itself  closer,  more  intense  and  revealing. 
Intimate  human  documents  of  personal  correspondence  have 
become  consummately  attractive.  Letters  set  me  free — out 
of  the  prison  house  of  self.  That's  the  key  to  our  pursuit.  I 
do  not  write  to  get  answers,  yet  I  have  found  the  answers  to 
be  more  involving  and  real  than  formal  lines  of  print.  Any- 
thing that  sets  one  free,  that  draws  forth  his  best  from  different 
angles,  speeds  the  way  to  Open  Country.  There  is  more  to 
these  relations  established  through  letters  than  mere  pages  of 
writing,  and  there  is  no  limit  to  the  work  that  one  can  do.  A. 
E.,  in  his  Candle  of  Vision,  has  told  something  about  the  use 
of  real  powers  which  not  one  in  a  million  understands.  It  is 
said  that  only  one  in  fifteen  units  of  heat  comes  out  into  the 
room  from  the  average  open  fire-place — the  rest  up  the  chim- 
ney. People  in  the  world  waste  their  powers  as  an  open  fire- 
place wastes  heat.  "Yet  the  fire-light  is  dear.  .  .  . 

We  read  books  and  we  go  to  plays ;  we  travel  from  mountain 
to  shore — to  forget  ourselves.     Happiness  is  the  loss  of  the 


THE    BOOK     OF     THE    HEART 

sense  of  self.  You  may  try  in  a  thousand  ways  to  get  by  this 
conclusion,  but  steadily  it  will  be  brought  back  to  you,  face 
to  face  at  the  end,  until  there  isn't  a  quibble  or  a  wobble  left. 
It  is  the  loss  of  the  self  to  find  the  Self. 

A  page  of  typewritten  copy  driven  straight  to  one  mind — 
if  possible  with  the  carrying  force  of  great-heartedness — is 
often  taken  and  held  entire  by  that  other,  so  that  it  becomes  a 
tablet.  Neither  the  one  who  receives  nor  the  one  who  sends 
is  the  same  again  ...  It  seems  to  me  that  priceless  docu- 
ments of  the  human  heart — writings  that  have  not  found  print, 
yet  which  contain  the  profoundest  truths  of  life — come  to  my 
table  from  day  to  day  around  the  world.  Continually  before 
me  are  pages  ruddy  and  strong  with  life.  Their  vibration  is 
a  part  of  my  strength — intimate  human  pages,  spiritual  self- 
revelations.  .  .  .  All  life  is  in  human  association.  Books 
pass,  but  we  never  pass  men.  We  read  a  myriad  of  books,  to 
open  at  last  the  Book  of  the  Heart  which  is  Humanity. 


VOL.  ONE 

THE  MYSTIC  ROAD 

The  First  Nineteen    ' 

of  the 

Will  Levington  Comfort  Letters 

A  Temporary  Edition  in  Paper  at 
One  Dollar 

'  '*  The  world  needs  to  know  that  a  great  love  story 
is  the  story  of  an  Initiation.  *  *  *  The  inter-attraction 
of  man  and  woman  calls  forth  the  highest  potency  of  love 
in  this  Place;  therefore  it  involves  the  strongest  energy 
we  have  to  work  with  for  spiritual  unfoldment.  The 
real  romance  of  man  and  woman,  is  not  entered  upon  until 
organic  desire  is  mastered.  The  beautiful  possibilities  of 
generation,  not  to  mention  the  next  step  of  regeneration, 
are  not  dreamed  of  in  a  mind  which  is  at  the  mercy  of 
sensuous  passion.  Since  one  cannot  know  the  full  power 
of  his  passion  until  the  love  nature  is  awakened,,  he  cannot 
enter  the  ordeals  of  conquest  alone.  It  would  follow  that 
two  who  love  and  fulfill  the  Law  are  therefore  involved 
in  the  highest  possibilities  of  mystical  attainment,  and  that 
they  form  a  center  of  radiant  regenerative  force  in  the 
world.  *  *  * 

WILL  LEVINGTON  COMFORT 

4993  PASADENA  AVENUE 
LOS  ANGELES,  CALIFORNIA 


GayJord  Bros.,  Inc.! 

Makers 

Stockton,  Calif 
W.  JAN.  21.  1908  ' 


831909 


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